As consumer vehicles such as cars and trucks become more complicated, operation of that vehicle becomes less intuitive. Owners become frustrated with traditional owner's manuals that are typically printed matter in a booklet form, some form of electronic archival media viewable with a computer or like device, or some form of audio-video presentation. This frustration typically results from an inability to find the answers to the questions posed. Typically the information is needed while operating the vehicle during times when access to the traditional owner's manuals described above is impossible, or at least unsafe. For instance, attempting to learn how to re-set the time on the digital clock integrated with the audio system on the dashboard often requires a vehicle owner to survey a range of potential terms to describe the situation—clock, time, audio system, CD-audio system. Figuring out how to make the cruise control work, while driving, is another example.
Today there is such an array of devices in trucks and cars that driver distraction is a major problem. Manipulating controls is enough of a problem without having to try to read a book while driving. Even with the advent of Telematics systems in vehicles today there is not currently a service that is deployed which would solve the above-described problems. Thus, it would be a significant advancement in the art to provide a menu-driven, automatic voice recognition system at a remote data center that would deliver vehicle operator-requested information from a database over a wireless link to the vehicle operator in a hands-free environment. The primary advantages of the remote data center are flexibility and cost effectiveness. Because the platform is off-board, the application can easily be modified without changing any in-vehicle hardware, or software. Such flexibility allows for user personalization and application bundling, in which a number of different applications are accessible through a voice main menu. In terms of cost, server-based voice recognition resources can be shared across a large spectrum of different vehicles. For example, 48 channels of server-based voice recognition can accommodate over a thousand vehicles simultaneously.